Makana’s Haunting Song from Russian Nuclear Bunker

https://vimeo.com/310276887

Makana’s Haunting Song from Russian Nuclear Bunker

“Standing in the tomb-like space, my soul began to cry in the form of song,” says Makana. As one of over a million people in Hawai'i who were told on January 13, 2018 that they were about to be hit by a nuclear missile, renowned Hawai’i artist Makana said, “Waking to an alert of a nuclear attack in Hawai’i got me thinking. Why is this even a possibility?”

When Makana found out that the US and Russia possess over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, he was inspired to travel to Russia: “I wanted to experience this other country, people and land first hand. This journey led to the creation of relationships and then art to share with the public on both sides of the ocean. My intention is to inspire and remind us all to humanize one another, to dignify and be curious about each other. The conversations that do get broadcast are political conversations, of threat, of geopolitics. But those conversations have virtually nothing to do with the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people in our two nations. We need to create direct relationships. It’s the only way that we – nationally and individually – will ever achieve security and peace.”

Makana was the first American ever to descend into Russian nuclear fallout shelter Bunker 703. Makana was inspired to improvise a song on the spot. What we witness in the video is the process of lyrics and music being created and sung for the very first time. The moment was captured on film with a hand-held camera and microphone.

In one take, Makana created the haunting ballad, Mourning Armageddon, both a song of mourning and a call to action. Images inside the bunker are otherworldly, indelible. The surreal acoustics reverberate inside a chamber, hermetically sealed and deep enough to withstand a nuclear blast--evoking the sound of a kind of nuclear chamber music, a post-apocalyptic “wake for the world.”

”We’re in bed with annihilation,” Makana says. “There is a phrase in Hawaiian: "Kū'ē i ka papau make"- Resist annihilation. “It’s time for people everywhere to do that.”

Mourning Armageddon (Lyrics)

I’m underground
What a sound
All around

How did I get down here
So low
Where did all the people go
In my mind
I don’t know if it’s real

When I think
What could happen
Why they built this
Why it came to be
Why we build places like this
With our mind
Oooooh
With our mind

But it’s just a container
And it’s up to us
To change
Gotta see each other
As friends not enemies
We can bring peace

I hope we never have to build another shelter
Like this
Never gonna build another bunker
Like this
Oooooohhh
Oooooohhh

I’m underground
Hear this sound
All around

How did I get down here
So low
Where did all the people
All go
In my mind
It was all
Just a dream

 

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'Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.'
~ Henry David Thoreau